6i4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



modern times, what are the shrines in our mother-country which 

 we chiefly venerate, and to which the transatlantic pilgrim oftenest 

 directs his steps ? Is it her battle-field, her castles and baronial halls, 

 or such spots as Stratford-on-Avon, Abbotsford, and Rydal Mount ? 

 Why, then, will we not learn the lesson which history so plainly 

 teaches, and strive for those achievements in knowledge and mental 

 culture which will be remembered with gratitude when all local dis- 

 tinctions and political differences shall have passed away and been for- 

 gotten ? 



While I was considering the line of discourse which I should fol- 

 low on this occasion, an incident occurred suggesting an historical 

 parallel, which will illustrate, better than any reflections of mine, the 

 truth I would enforce. The ship Faraday arrived on our coast after 

 laying over the bed of the Atlantic another of those electric nerves 

 through which pulsate the thoughts of two continents, and, as I read 

 the description of that noble ship, fitted out with all the appliances 

 which modern science had created to insure the successful accomplish- 

 ment of the enterprise, I remembered that not a century had elapsed 

 since the first obscure phenomena were observed, whose conscientious 

 study, pursued with the unselfish spirit of the scientific investigator, 

 had led to these momentous results, and my imagination carried me 

 back to an autumn day of the year 1786, in the old city of Bologna, 

 in Italy, and I seemed to assist at the memorable experiment which 

 has associated the name of Aloysius Galvani T\dth that mode of electri- 

 cal energy which flashes through the wire-cords that now unite the 

 four quarters of the globe. 



Galvani is Professor of Anatomy in the University of Bologna, 

 and there is hanging from the iron balcony of his house a small animal 

 preparation, which is not an unfamiliar sight in Southern Europe, 

 where it is regarded as a delicacy of the table. It is the hind-legs of 

 a frog, from which the skin had been removed, and the great nerve 

 of the back exposed. Six years before, his attention had been called 

 to the fact that the muscles of the frog were convulsed by the indirect 

 action of an electrical machine, under conditions which he had found 

 very difficult to interpret. He had connected the phenomenon with a 

 theory of his own : that electricity — that is, common friction electri- 

 city, the only mode of electrical action then known — was the medium 

 of all nervous action ; and this had led him into a protracted investi- 

 gation of the subject, during which he had varied the original experi- 

 ment in a thousand ways, and he had now suspended the frog's legs 

 to the iron balcony, in order to discover if atmospheric electricity 

 would have any effect on the muscles of the animal. 



Galvani has spent a long day in fruitless watching, when, while 

 holding in his hand a brass wire, connected with the muscles of the 

 frog, he rubs the end, apparently listlessly, against the iron railing, 

 when, lo ! the frog's legs are convulsed. 



